Thursday, August 20, 2015

In hindsight, the way the Climategate emails was rolled out, after very careful scrutiny by the targeted bloggers, was handled pretty responsibly. Lets face it – “Mike’s Nature trick to hide the decline” means . . . “Mike’s Nature trick to hide the decline.[1]”

Wow. Judith Curry, ladies and gentlemen and deniers. Former serious person. What a joke.

In hindsight, we can say the Climategate witch hunt failed utterly. Michael Mann is better-known and better-regarded than he would have been without the denier crusade. Deniers humiliated themselves trying to discredit a "hockey stick" that has now been reproduced dozens of times.

The criminals who stole the emails passed them to their denier allies who used them deceptively, using every variety of quote sniping and ridiculous double standards -- hateful vicious right-wing crusaders picking through thousands of pages of emails, looking for a few lines where responsible scientists, in the course of private communications with each other, said mean things about idiots.

This was used by right-wingers already in denial of the facts to craft a mythology for their gullible dittoheads. Said dittoheads went on to threaten working scientists with imprisonment, murder, the rape of their children, lynchings in the street -- such was the fruit of the handling of stolen emails, to morons by way of liars.

Saturday, August 15, 2015

GIStemp has updated and the +0.75C anomaly makes July 2015 the hottest July in the instrumental record, setting another 12-month running average record and increasing the likelihood 2015 will break the record set in 2014(!).

Somebody tell me, I'm just a poor amateur -- are the records in a 135-year-old dataset supposed to come one right after another like that? Seems . . . concerning.

Wednesday, August 12, 2015

The US consumes approximately 4 billion MWh per year. Our GDP is currently about $18 trillion. So if you pay $50/MWh (good wind, unfiltered coal, unfiltered gas) your cost for that is $200 billion annually, or 1.1% of the GDP.

If you pay $100/MWh (nuclear, solar) your cost is 2.2% of GDP.

If you pay $150/MWh (offshore wind, gas with CCS, rooftop solar) your cost is 3.3% of the GDP.

The cost of intermittency is pretty minor:

Apologies for smallness, original here. Bottom line: at a 30% level of penetration, you can add about $30/MWh to the cost of wind or solar, or about 0.7% of the GDP.

In other words, the costs of ALL of the alternatives under discussion are minor. We can do what we want to do. Very high levels of penetration of intermittent sources like wind or solar poses special problems, but we are a long way from having those problems today (1.)

Arguing whether nuclear is cheap or expensive, or what the costs of waste disposal will be, or what the cost is to back up wind or solar, or whether the costs of PV systems will continue to fall, misses the point entirely. We have multiple affordable low-carbon options, and the question is not which is best -- we will learn more about that as we build and operate the plants, and different sources will be optimal for different communities in different circumstances.

The point is that we need to do something, and we have both the technology and the resources to solve this aspect of the global warming problem in the next ten to twenty years. In many ways, this is the easy part -- the electrical grid (easier to green than transportation, land use, or industrial CO2 release) in the richest country in the world. The fact that it is so easy and yet we haven't done it yet underscores that it is political will, not technology or money, that are lacking.

Conventional batteries continue to get better
and cheaper, but right now their capacity is orders of magnitude below
what would be needed to store, say two or three weeks of energy.

However
we do have a large amount of energy storage in the form of fossil
fuels: liquid, solid, and gas. This form of storage is stable on
geological time scales and extremely energy dense. Unlike many of the
alternatives, including chemical batteries, capicators, pumped hydro
storage, or molten sodium, the infrastructure to store and release
hydrocarbon energy is simple and cheap -- in the case of petroleum, it
can be as simple as a barrel or a hole in the ground. . . .

Start with a conventional gas plant equipped with carbon capture technology
(assuming we ever get serious about perfecting and deploying that
technology.) Then, rather than put the CO2 in the ground, feed it into a
synthetic natural gas
plant and use a clean energy source to turn the CO2 back into gas.
Burn, capture, and un-burn as needed in a closed cycle that doesn't
release CO2 into the atmosphere.

Regardless of how cleverly we deploy storage and smart grids, we will meet our emissions goal much faster with nuclear than without it, which is why I remain a strong supporter of retaining and building out the nuclear power sector, despite the irritating epistemic closure on the value of renewables and general hippie-punching tendencies of nuclear power's moreferventadvocates.